Report reveals Pennsylvania’s Native American boarding school legacy

A federal research launched final week on Native American boarding colleges nationwide discovered college students have been severely mistreated and in some situations died, together with in Pennsylvania.

Driving the information: The Inside Division report says kids at 408 federal Indian boarding colleges endured sexual and bodily abuse, handbook labor, and malnourishment between 1819 and 1969, as a part of the U.S. marketing campaign to compel their assimilation, Axios’ Shawna Chen writes.

• Inside Secretary Deb Haaland licensed the research final yr following the invention of Indigenous kids’s stays at a former Canadian residential faculty web site.

Zoom in: The primary federally run boarding faculty for Native American college students opened in Pennsylvania in 1879 and operated till 1918.

Of observe: Two different colleges opened in Pennsylvania within the late nineteenth century: Martinsburg Indian Faculty in Martinsburg and the Lincoln Establishment for Women in Philadelphia.

Between the traces: These colleges pressured Native American kids to assimilate by forbidding them from utilizing their native languages and names.

• In addition they restricted kids from collaborating of their spiritual and cultural practices.

What they’re saying: “The implications of federal Indian boarding faculty insurance policies — together with the intergenerational trauma attributable to the household separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of kids as younger as 4 years outdated — are heartbreaking and plain,” Haaland stated in a press release.